Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 89 posts

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#51

Post by hwbehrens »

spidersouris wrote: post #49
baby wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should not take someone a week to read a research paper Either you have never read a research paper, or you are gifted, or you have been doing that for so long in your field that you forgot how hard it can be when you start.

Before arguing for or against this statement, perhaps we should precise what kind of research papers we're talking about. We're on HN, so I know most comments of this thread are dealing with scientific research papers; I'm a student in humanities myself, so I've never taken the time to analyze such papers and I am thus unable to defend or counter OP's claim on this particular question. However, their comment applies…

As a counterexample, this [0] was a paper that I read and summarized for some colleagues a while back. It's fairly related to my area of expertise, so I didn't find it too bad -- maybe a couple of hours to grok it and do a write-up.

However, among my colleagues (all very talented in their own unrelated areas) it generated a fair amount of consternation, because although they had a week to read it, none of them felt like they had a good grasp of it until after I had presented it. The key takeaways that had jumped out at me immediately were lost in the noise.

Whether or not a week is the right time, I can definitely empathize with taking more than a day to evaluate a paper, particularly in an area not very near to your own as there might be a lot of missing background to fill in. In contrast, my PhD advisor could flip through a paper in 30 seconds and pick up the key points it took me an hour to extract. In that sense, I really think that reading papers is a skill that can be trained.

[0]: https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2020/13109/pdf/LIPI...

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#52

Post by alexkreidler »

pyuser583 wrote: post #39

I strongly suggest “How to Read a Book” by Adler. It’s an excellent discussion of types and levels of reading. When faced with a large, imposing text, my method is: 1. Read the title page, table of contents, index, and introduction several times. This should make it clear what the book is about and how it’s structure. 2. Read it straight through from start to end. No notes. Don’t worry about not understanding. Intell…

Agreed. I highly recommend the 1940 edition. There's an online version from the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/howtoreadabook1940edition/page/n...

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#54

Post by kurosawa »

alexkreidler wrote: post #52
pyuser583 wrote: post #39

I strongly suggest “How to Read a Book” by Adler. It’s an excellent discussion of types and levels of reading. When faced with a large, imposing text, my method is: 1. Read the title page, table of contents, index, and introduction several times. This should make it clear what the book is about and how it’s structure. 2. Read it straight through from start to end. No notes. Don’t worry about not understanding. Intell…

Agreed. I highly recommend the 1940 edition. There's an online version from the Internet Archive here: https://archive.org/details/howtoreadabook1940edition/page/n...

why this edition specifically?

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#55

Post by samus »

Research papers are supposed to be read in the following order:

1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Conclusions

Skipping to the end sounds counter-intuitive, but it will prevent you from getting lost in the nitty-gritty details of the paper. It makes rarely sense to read a paper front-to-back in one session. You have to pace yourself. Also, if you don't know the domain that well, you will get lost in trying to understand the "basics" and will have difficulties in making use of the paper's contents.

Similar for textbooks. Usually, an effort is made to structure them for learners, but they can't help but end up being reference works that require a study plan to really be of use.

Time is usually too short to try to learn everything. Thus my recommendation is to decide what you really want to focus on, and create a study plan of sorts.

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#56

Post by obua »

michael_nielsen wrote: post #33
awild wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It should not take someone a week to read a research paper. Depending on the paper maybe a day but usually a few hours. Carefully studying it is something else and that might take a week, but not every paper needs that kind of attention and it's a valuable skill to learn skimming and differentiating between un-/valuable and un-/interesting papers.

Right - if the paper is really good, it might take a few years to understand. Most papers can be read in I'm caricaturing, but only a tiny bit, this is how I read. And for good stuff, that I want to understand, a page an hour is (often) pretty typical for my first fairly thorough read. I've written two textbooks, and in both cases I thought of the book as the distilled outcome from reading about a dozen very importan…

I know you don't believe in formal logic, but maybe give this paper a chance: https://obua.com/publications/philosophy-of-abstraction-logi...

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#57

Post by psychomugs »

a_e_k wrote: post #50
psychomugs wrote: post #27

Research papers demand more read-throughs compared to other genres. My fellow grad students had their own reading styles, but I think my approach was fairly typical: - Review: amass several papers related to the topic, either through search (e.g. Google Scholar) or through a survey paper on the topic. - Filter: read the abstracts and decide which papers are worth skimming. - Skim: read the introduction, skim the figu…

That's pretty close to my approach. I'd suggest not just limiting yourself to just the initial set of papers amassed in your "Review" step, though. Feel free to add new papers to your queue at any time if you come across an interesting term or citation. It's okay for this to be a breadth-first search.

I agree on this and definitely left this out, though I do find this step difficult - it’s a recursive loop with a fuzzy stopping condition that can get pretty deep.

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#58

Post by belter »

asdff wrote: post #53

This is a classic: https://web.stanford.edu/class/ee384m/Handouts/HowtoReadPape...

Also found this set useful

==========

How to Read a Scientific Paper Efficiently and Critically https://youtu.be/lXJeU2dzzWo

How to Use Narrative Structure in a Scientific Paper https://youtu.be/XW77hpjNTvY

Writing Is Thinking https://youtu.be/tX9asHdFSv4

How to Write Clearly: Cohesion & Coherence https://youtu.be/FpOPA3GFeJg

==========

Re: How to read research paper, textbook, long text content?

#60

Post by tralarpa »

samus wrote: post #55

Research papers are supposed to be read in the following order: 1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Conclusions Skipping to the end sounds counter-intuitive, but it will prevent you from getting lost in the nitty-gritty details of the paper. It makes rarely sense to read a paper front-to-back in one session. You have to pace yourself. Also, if you don't know the domain that well, you will get lost in trying to understand…

> 1. Abstract 2. Introduction 3. Conclusions

I know this is what students are told, but I rarely manage to understand the topic of a paper by reading the introduction and conclusion. Too many buzzwords. I usually look for the "big picture" in the literal sense (e.g. a figure showing the architecture the authors have designed etc.) and, life pro tip, the axes of the plots ("ah, there are doing something with latency and number of threads") :)

Post reply on HN